A new report from anti-virus tools vendor OPSWAT shows a very fractionated marketplace, at least among the actual end-users that employ their toolkit from which the data is collected. Surprisingly, (or maybe not, depending on your perspective) the free AV products account for nearly half of the market. Symantec is in third place with all of its AV products at 10 percent, behind AVAST at 19% and Avira AntiVir at 11%.
Most vendor’s individual AV products are more popular than their suites: the notable exception is Kaspersky’s suite, with about twice the market share of its stand-alone AV product.
Interestingly, Windows 7 has already surpassed Vista in terms of desktop share: 19 % to 18% respectively, with XP still occupying 62% of desktops.
While not every AV vendor deploys Opswat-centric tools, many of the largest corporate security vendors have something to do with this software, so keep this in mind when interpreting these results.
Vendors in the antivirus/internet security industry probably aren’t surprised by the overall results. Perhaps the exact rankings, but not the fact that a large number of home users place their faith in “free” AV. Outside the industry, they may be surprised by the numbers. The vendors do have to make sure to explain to home users exactly what the “free” version captures versus the “paid” version or an internet security sweet. However, much of them, and the press, consider any bad to be a virus. Strictly speaking, this is not the case.